I’ve only had a handful of traditional jobs in my life, and they were all paid internships in college.
Since then, I’ve become an expert in avoiding the corporate 9-5 world and developing passive income streams to finance my life!
Believe me, I’m not rich. I don’t own a jet and I don’t have a huge mansion (at least not yet haha). But, I do have a tremendous amount of freedom in my life and don’t have to rely on a company’s paycheck for my living expenses.
This isn’t just me either. I have many friends online who do the same thing, some who are far more successful than I am.
It can be done. You can earn income outside of your job, or, if you don’t have a college degree or the right qualifications, you can set up your own online business and, with time, make it your full-time job.
I’m not here to say that you can do it overnight, but given enough time, you can generate sustainable income without a traditional job. You can do it online and a few different ways that I’ll highlight below.
It all comes down to the type of work that you want, what you’re passionate about, and the skills that you’re willing to learn in order to succeed!
I’ve put together 5 simple steps to get you up and running!
Step 1: Decide whether you want to earn it online or offline.
Online business is very different from offline business. It also has a whole different skill set that’s necessary to succeed. Often times, there’s also some overlap between the online world and the physical world.
Earning 10k offline
The fastest way to earn $10,000 in the offline world when you have little education or business background is to work for someone else on a commission basis. Yes, I’m talking about sales.
The great thing about sales is that you’re paid for the results you generate. If you make a lot of sales, you’re paid a fat commission. If you don’t, you won’t be. You are responsible for your income and success.
You don’t need fancy degrees to get into sales. You just need a willingness to learn and a hunger to get good at the sales process, interpersonal communication, and increasing your emotional intelligence.
Although you could earn that money by taking a traditional hourly job, it’s going to be the old waiting game. Just do the math.
Let’s say you’re able to pick up an extra 20 hours per week worth of work and you’re paid at $10 and hour. It would take you AN ENTIRE YEAR to earn $10,000, and that doesn’t count holidays or taxes.
But, if you’re selling a product that’s priced at $10,000 and you get a 10% commission, you could earn that with only 10 sales!
If you’re a skilled worker and have a lot of experience in your field, then consulting would be the quickest way to earn this money.
But, if you’re just starting out, hands down, it’s going to be sales. I recommend starting out with the book “How to Master the Art of Selling” by Tom Hopkins.
Focusing on improving your ability to sell will also improve your results in other areas of your life. It will also be a great bootcamp if you ever want to venture out on your own some day and start your own business!
Earning 10k online
This is the area that I specialize in. I love online business because, when you set up a business properly, you can continually generate leads for your company and earn an income stream.
On one of my websites, I’ve earned over 10K from advertisements alone, and that doesn’t count services, digital products, consulting, and product recommendations.
I don’t say that to brag about my income. I say that because I’m proud of how I’ve serviced happy customers and brought value to their life. I’ve genuinely made their life better.
Before I talk about some ways to generate passive income online, I wanted to highlight the areas that I recommend investing time in learning if you’d like to earn sustainable income through specific work:
Computer programming. Programmers can easily earn $40-80/hr and up, depending on their skills and the project. I started out my career with website development. I built my first website for a client at age 14.
The cool thing about programming it encompasses a lot of areas. You can learn to make mobile apps, websites, desktop applications, and more. Also, you can do it from home!
Although there is a learning curve, the skills you’ll acquire will be invaluable.
Online marketing. The great thing when you’re good at online marketing is that it doesn’t matter how old you are. All that matters is whether or not you can generate traffic and convert that traffic into sales. The best marketers are able to create income for themselves outside of providing services to their clients.
Like programming, online marketing encompasses a lot of different areas of expertise like SEO, social media, public relations, content creation, copywriting, conversion optimization, and more.
Another huge benefit about online marketing is that you don’t need to be in the physical location of your client. You can work from your pajamas if you really want.
Okay, let’s talk about generating 10k passively online.
There are a lot of websites out there that claim that they can help you do this. They promise fast riches with minimal effort.
Everything in life takes effort or has a cost associated with it. For example, taking on debt and getting an unsecured loan with a site like Prosper or Lending Club, will cause you to acquire an obligation.
Becoming a highly paid finance professional requires a time and financial investment. The same is true of the online world. Yes, the money is out there, but it takes time to learn the skills to be able to deliver great services or products to your clients and customers.
Ultimately, the task comes down to two things: traffic and conversions.
When you’re earning income online, you can earn it in four main ways:
- Your own products
- Your own services
- Recommending or displaying products of other people
- Recommending or displaying the services of other people.
This even encompasses areas like advertising. When you think about it, if you display an advertisement on your website, you’re making money for another business owner (assuming visitors click through to their website).
In the rest of this guide, I’m going to be focusing on earning income online with these four different strategies.
Step 2: Offer online services
Offering services are how most entrepreneurs that I’ve met get started earning income online. These could be consulting, freelance or contact-based services.
You can offer these services on your website or on marketplaces like:
Remember that online, your reputation is everything. One bad review or negative blog post will haunt you for the rest of your days!
I would recommend contacting anyone that you’ve worked for in the past and asking for a testimonial. You can also ask if you can use their company’s logo on your website.
You can start your career in a number of ways, ranging from:
- freelance writing
- graphic design
- gigs on fiverr
- being a virtual assistant
It all depends on your key skills.
In my experience, this is the fastest and easiest way to make money online for beginners. However, you do need to be good at something that’s valuable to a business owner or customer.
Aside from establishing credibility, the hardest part initially is setting up your own website.
I personally use Bluehost and wordpress to set up my sites. There are a lot of free and paid wordpress themes out there that you can download.
However, you can also use website builders like Squarespace, Wix, and Webs.
3. Create ebooks and courses
eBooks have already taken over the publishing industry and online courses are slowly challenging the mainstream education system.
Now, you don’t need your own website to sell ebooks or courses that you’ve put together. You can put up an online course on Udemy or Lynda.
Here are two articles worth looking into:
- How To Make $4000+ A Month On Udemy
- I currently make about $550/month on Udemy and put in about 10 hours a month of work into it per month.
However, there are also a lot of entrepreneurs out there who recommend avoiding Udemy (I am in this camp), because of the lack of control you have over your customer and content.
I’d look into this article which explains why Udemy might not be a great income earning source in the long run.
Also, you can publish your ebook on Amazon or the iBooks store. There are a lot of experts out there who are seeing success with the Amazon marketplace. Take a look at:
- How much money can one Kindle book make? (1 year case study)
- Steve Scott Site and how he makes $40k per month.
- How to (Really) Make $1,000,000 Selling E-Books – Real-World Case Studies
Although publishing a course or an ebook into an existing marketplace is an easy way to get started, in the long run, I’d recommend hosting your ebook or course on your own website. Not only will you have more control over the design, format, and purchase of the course, but you’ll also have the maximum amount of say with regards to the marketing messaging.
There are a lot of wordpress plugins and external tools that you can use to create a private course. I recommend looking into:
4. Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is when you’ll recommend products or services that were created by other businesses. Unfortunately, it usually takes a bit of time to identify the right products to sell for a particular industry and how to get traffic to your website.
But, once you figure out these crucial aspects of online business, affiliate income is as close to magic income as it gets. You just get written checks. You don’t have to deal with customers and don’t have to worry about costs or expenses.
When I first read about affiliate marketing, I thought it must be some bogus online scam. But, I’m here to tell you that it’s actually a way that you can earn income online. Last month alone, I earned $800 from an affiliate program.
The most important part of affiliate marketing is putting the customer first. How can you best service the needs and interests of the customers? Whatever you do, don’t promote crappy products!
As you can see, most of the ways to earn $10,000 without a traditional job come back to the same core skills. You need to learn how to market and sell, both in person and online.
There are a bunch of affiliate programs out there and marketplaces like:
You can also join company-specific affiliate programs. Not every company that you want to promote will be a part of the marketplaces above. You can always inquire whether or not a company has some kind of affiliate program.
5. Ads and sponsorships
Finally generating income from ads and sponsored content is another way to generate income. This is definitely harder if you’re in the beginning stages and still working to build up traffic to your website. However, there are mediums that are currently seeing a high revenue per 1,000 impressions, like Instagram and Podcasting.
I broke down in another post exactly how to get a sponsor for a podcast and in the future, I’ll reveal how I’m building up a new instagram account as a new passive income stream.
Personally, it took me about a year before I was generating meaningful advertising revenue (I also didn’t do sponsored articles), but, if you think about it, how awesome would it be a year from now to earn an entirely new income stream?
How will you earn $10,000?
It all comes down to your willingness to work hard and hustle. A healthy degree of self-awareness regarding what you’re good at and what you suck at will also go a long way!
If you’re just starting out, the only way to earn $10,000 in a short period of time is to take ridiculously massive action and to work your ass off.
Commit to putting in the hours and learning everything that you need to know to succeed. Make the promise to yourself that you will never quit and that you’re going to give this goal every fiber of your being. When you fail, you’re just going to attack the goal again and again until you reach it!